In the 5th hour of teaching the level 4 ESL oral communicative class, we had 5 Chinese students in the class while the Japanese student was absent. The goal of this class was to encourage the students to express their own opinions about food with discussion-specific language, improve students’ presentation skills, and practice their listening skills in capturing details. The topic Food was one of the topics that the students expressed their interest in. We shared our class outline and objectives followed by a warm-up activity which also included a review of the discussion language. After the discussion session, the students presented their opinions. There were a listening practice and a post-presentation instruction after the presentations, and we end our class with an exit activity.
There were a few successes in this class. Firstly, the students in the group I observed and facilitated participated actively in the discussion, and they tried to use the discussion language throughout their discussion. While they were discussing, I typed some of the vocabulary and phrases that they used incorrectly in the public chat. After they finished their discussion, I spent the left 50 seconds to give them some instruction of the vocabulary and phrases so that they could practice them immediately in their follow-up presentations. I was very happy to see that they used the newly learned vocabulary and phrases actively and correctly in their presentations. Second, we finish this class exactly on time. Our warm-up activity went a little longer than we expected so I cut a bit of the discussion time to cover that. Although the time for discussion was still enough for the students to discuss, my partner and I will plan a shorter warm-up activity so that the students will have a longer time to discuss.
In the presentation session, students’ participation was not so well balanced. Some of the students were actively engaged while a few talked less. I was thinking if we could assign each student to present the group opinions on specific discussion questions or assign different presenters of each group every time. I will discuss it with my partner and decide which approach we will employ for our next class.
In our post-presentation instruction, I taught the students the pronunciations of some vocabulary and a phrase that was incorrectly used by the students. Next time, we will take our advisor’s advice and creating meaning communications to encourage the students to practice the phrases.